Brahma

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

JR - pg. 74

-- I'll ride you into town ... and they entered the car out of sight behind its filthy windows as its lights too receded and became mere punctuations in this aimless spread of evening past the firehouse and the crumbling Marine Memorial, the blooded barberry and woodbine's silent siege and the desirable property For Sale, up weeded ruts and Queen Anne's laces to finally mount the sky itself where another blue day brought even more the shock of fall in its brilliance, spread loss like shipwreck on high winds tossing those oaks back in waves blown over with whitecaps where their leaves showed light undersides and dead branches cast brown sprays to the surface, straining at the height of the pepperidge tree and blowing down the open highway to find voice in the screams of the electric saws prospering through Burgoyne Street

JR - pg. 63

-- I think James thought that Saint-Saens was rather silly, with his theosophy and all the rest of it.

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him.

The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff a leaping flame.

JR - pg. 57

-- See, Donny? Daddy's not mad, he just wanted his penny back ... for the recorded remonstrance he listened to through to the end before lowering his eyes from that hostile spectacle of growth to dial again, and raise them again to his wife out there scrubbing her sari with water from the garden hose squatted like some Gangetic laundress, number stare fixed on the remotely male privilege of the hunt as it prospered, here, past frilled ironwork make of aluminum to appear new and new lengths of post and rail treated to appear old, in the form of Bast near a gallop behind prey in a heedless trot moe secure, with each step, in the protective drab of black patterned on gray, frayed, knotted, an unshorn in other details, as the intervals between bayberry keeping mown distance form mimosa alerted by Insurance, Chiropodist, This desirable property For Sale, God Answer's Prayer, gave way to depths of locust long stunted in internecine struggle now grappling with woodbine, and the sidewalk itself finally disappeared under grass at the designated site by God's grace of an edifice for worship by the people of Primitive Baptist Church on a sign about to be reclaimed by the undergrowth.

JR - pg. 49

-- What do you mean do I go around with narcotics signing petitions painting slop writing books full of dirty words with a beard? They just want something for nothing half of them are crazy anyhow what about the one he just said he was afraid his head would fall off? Or your big name painter that cut off his ear what about him.

JR - pg. 32

- Rhine .. G O L D! they howled into the glare of footlights, cowering round the empty table at the center of the stage.
-- Rhinemaidens! ... The baton rapped sharply through their declining wail -- This is your shout of triumph. A joyful cry! Bast thumped out the theme again on the piano, missed a note, winced, repeated it. -- Can't you sound joyful, Rhinemaidens? Look, look around you. The river is glittering with golden light. You're swimming around the rock where the Rhinegold is. The Rhinegld! You love the Rhinegold Rhinemaidens, you ...

JR - pg. 17

To the squeal of brakes , the car burst out into the world trailing a festoon of privet, swerved at the immediate prospect of open acres flowered in funereal abundance to regain the pavement and lose it again in a brief threat to the candy wrappers and beer cans nestled along the hedge line up the highway, that quickly out of sight to the windows' half-shaded stare from the roof pitches frowning over the hedge to where i ended, and a yellow barn took up, and was gone in a swerving miss for the pepperidge tree towering ahead, past shadeless windows in a naked farmhouse sprawl at the corner where the road trimmed into the suburban labyrinth and things came scaled down to wieldy size, dogwood, then barberry, becomingly streaked blood-red for fall.

JR - pg. 11

-- Just behind your left shoulder Mister Cohen, that's always been my favorite picture of James. There, the two men sitting in the tree, the other one was Maurice Ravel. It shows James ' profile off so nicely, though he always felt that our Indian blood ...